The Daddy Daughter Podcast!

Since I moved to Atlanta, I’ve been faced with a challenging new reality: the morning and afternoon commute. Make no mistake, it ain’t particularly fun. Well, let me back up. It *wasn’t* particularly fun. When I first began my morning ritual a couple of years ago, it was quite a shock going from a 10 minute drive along the ocean into work every morning to the soul-crushing shuttle back and forth between Buckhead and the suburbs of East Cobb. However, I quickly discovered that the 30-45 minutes every morning and afternoon that I spent in quiet contemplation could be augmented by listening to audio books (a favorite of mine) and something that I hadn’t really spent a great deal of time with prior to moving to Atlanta and that’s podcasts. Don’t get me wrong, I was WELL aware that geek culture thrived within the podcasting community but I had just never literally had the time to sit down and listen to 30-45 minutes of talk in one sitting. Well… until now that is.

So I quickly dove in and began devouring podcasts. Of course the first ones on my radar were the Smodcast and Nerdist properties and I quickly realized why I had been a lifelong Kevin Smith fan. I love his particular brand of humor, and I had LONG been a fan of his speaking engagements and his legendary storytelling skills (If you haven’t heard the story of “Superman and the Giant Spider” then I would suggest that you stop what you’re doing right now and go give it a listen) and it was great to hear that enthusiasm and raw energy carried over into his podcasting endeavors.

The thing that stood out though (and one of the reasons why Kevin’s such a great guy) is how sincere he is, and continues to be, about his roots and about how easy creativity is from his view. He’s always been a scrappy creative, legendarily self-funding his first creative effort, 1994’s “Clerks” and his podcasting was no different. He regularly encourages his audience to get out there and try it too by reinforcing the notion that he’s no different from anyone else, he’s just got something to say and all he needs is a platform and a microphone and he’ll tell you what he thinks. Who wouldn’t be inspired by that?

I certainly was. I eventually realized that I had been bitten by the bug. I wanted to try podcasting too.

Of COURSE, I immediately began thinking of what my comic book podcast would be about. After all, what else was I going to talk about? I love comics, I can talk about comics until the cows come home, and let’s be honest, there’s not THAT many compelling podcasts about comics (trust me on this one, I’ve listened to them all). Simultaneously, at work, we had begun talking about content creation and I had naturally advocated for podcasting, and so we purchased a sort of “starter kit” of podcasting equipment: a mixer, a couple of microphones, etc. and were off to the races. Of course, like any well-meaning internal effort, it didn’t get the immediate traction I had hoped, but I still wanted to pursue it, so I grabbed all the equipment and put it in my car to take to the house to play around with.

That was when my daughter saw it.

“What’s that?”, she asked. Being an 8-year old girl who immerses herself in play that revolves around singing and being a “rock star” and “starting a band”, she was immediately drawn to the microphones. When I explained what they were for, and what a podcast was, she didn’t waste a minute. “Can we podcast?”. It was like being struck by lightening. “Of course we can! That’s a great idea!”.

The Daddy Daughter Podcast was born.

After a couple of starts and stops where we had to get past the notion that you just sit down and spit out a podcast, we were becoming comfortable with the hardware and software. I spent an hour or so on Lynda.com getting an overview of Garage Band, read a couple of websites about producing podcasts, and felt like I had at least an understanding of the hardest part of the process (producing an XML feed? Cake. Syndication? Easy as pie. Engineering sound? Not so much…) and so we finally sat down to record. That first day we recorded 20 minutes of conversation and when we were done we both realized that we were hooked. We were podcasters.

The idea behind the podcast was deceptively simple. A dad and his 8-year old daughter were gonna just sit down and have a conversation. But when the conversation happened, something magical happened. We connected. We didn’t just talk to one another, we had a conversation. She talked. I listened. I talked. She listened. We shared ideas and laughed. I knew immediately I had lightning in a bottle and I wasn’t about to let it out.

The more I thought about that conversation and the potential for future conversations, the more I realized the potential of the idea. Working in advertising, I’m keenly aware of the value of insights. Understanding what motivates people and what are their likes, dislikes and passion points is the currency of my business. Outside of a focus group, where were you going to get raw, unfiltered opinions from that group? I began to wonder, what was her insight into her peer group? What could she see through? What were her thoughts about the things that she’s constantly being bombarded with at her age? Toys? Games? Books? Movies? How did these things flow through her life? I found myself becoming genuinely curious about my daughter and her world, and I was blown away beyond words at how articulate she could express those thoughts. I was stunned. I had little woman who had opinions and ideas and she was sharing them… with me.

After that first podcast, I realized this was much bigger than my plans to play around and tinker with how I was going to use *my* platform to air *my* voice. I had empowered my daughter. I had given HER a platform… and I was never going to give that up.

So give it a listen. Subscribe. We’re available on iTunes and Stitcher, as well as Soundcloud (latest episode embedded below), where the podcasts are hosted. We’re going to shoot for an episode a week and in a couple of weeks we’ll look at doing a live podcast from Dragon Con.

In the meantime, take a few minutes and listen to what it sounds like when you give an 8-year old girl a microphone and let her tell you what she thinks.